Morning Security Brief: Afghan Prison Break, Cyberpork?, British Cybersecurity Spending, PS3 Network Hacked, & Kadhafi Praised

♦ Interpol rips Afghanistan for its incompetence after a massive Taliban jailbreak this week. "Taliban insurgents organised a daring jailbreak in the southern Afghan town of Kandahar on Monday, freeing some 500 prisoners including convicted terrorists by digging a tunnel from a nearby house," reports Reuters."Interpol said Afghan authorities had not been trained or equipped to store photographs, fingerprints and DNA of dangerous terrorists and this would seriously hinder efforts to track down the escapers." Interpol's Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said in a statement that ""Until this glaring and serious void in the world's anti-terror efforts is filled, no country can consider itself secure from criminals and terrorists."

♦ Is cybersecurity spending a pork-filled mess?Two researchers from George Mason University think so. "Brito and Tate Watkins, at the Mercatus Center at GMU, wrote a research paper titled: Loving the Cyber Bomb? The dangers of threat inflation in cybersecurity policy," The Baltimore Sun's Gus Sentementes reports. "In the paper, they draw an analogy of the current political and national rhetoric on cybersecurity policy with the run-up to the Iraq War, and how the military, the press and public officials didn't paint the whole picture for the public."

♦ Across the pond, the British government is giving an overview of how it will spend larger amounts of public funds on cybersecurity. "The government will spend 65% of the £650m it has earmarked for cyber security on capabilities, while a further 20% will be spent on critical cyber infrastructure, according to Ian McGhie, deputy director of the Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance (Ocsia)," reports the Guardian. "The rest of the £650m will be spent on cyber crime specifics (9%) and education (1%), as well as 5% in reserve.... The government first announced plans to spend more on cyber security in October 2010 as part of its Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR)."

♦ Cybersecurity, however, has become a big deal for Sony. The company "has warned about 70 million users of its PlayStation consoles that it believes their personal details have been stolen by a hacker who forced the company to shut down its global gaming network last week," according to The Independent. "The Japanese firm made the admission last night – six days after the attack forced it to close down the PlayStation Network, which allows gamers to play online against each other. The breach, which is thought to have compromised passwords, billing and email addresses as well as other personal data, has prompted fears that many young people could be particularly vulnerable."

♦ Former CIA Director Michael Hayden pays a compliment to Col. Moamer Kadhafi. "Speaking at a conference of the Marine Corps University, Hayden said the CIA had worked well with Kadhafi and Mussa Kussa, the foreign minister who defected last month as Libyan forces moved against rebels," reports Agence France Presse. According to Hayden, "Whatever you think of Kadhafi and Mussa Kussa... they were good and they were good counter-terrorism partners."